Harvey has demonstrated that a storm doesn’t always do its worst damage when the winds are blowing the hardest.

Photograph by Gregory Bull / AP

There was an eerie, if artificial, orderliness to the blast in the
early hours of Thursday at the Arkema chemical plant, in Crosby, Texas.
On Wednesday, the company had let the local authorities know that
floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey had taken out the power at the plant,
as well as the backup systems necessary to cool the organic peroxide
compounds that were used to make its products, which include
countertops and Styrofoam cups. When the chemicals got warm, they would
“degrade,” which meant, in practical terms, that they could burst their
containers and ignite. The company, which had pulled out its employees,
suggested evacuating the immediate area. The authorities agreed, and
told people to get out of a mile-and-a-half radius around the plant.
(The population of Crosby is slightly more than two thousand people.)
Then they waited, and, indeed, shortly before 2 A.M. Thursday, at least
one container blew, starting a fire that sent flames shooting into the
sky and black smoke billowing thirty to forty feet up. There were eight
more containers in the plant, and the company said that it expected them
to blow up, too. The safest thing, Arkema said, was just to let it all
“burn itself out.”

What was in those clouds of smoke? The local authorities and the company
tried to convey the idea that, although the smoke may be dangerous, it was
not, say, a haze of poison. At a press conference in Crosby, outside the
evacuation zone, Bob Royall, the assistant chief of the Harris County
fire marshal’s office, said, “It’s hydrocarbons burning. There’s a lot
of things made of hydrocarbons.” Did that mean that it was safe? “You
don’t want to inhale smoke, do you?” Royall continued. “It’s plain and
simple. It’s smoke. With carbon particles in it.” (Royall also said
that he preferred to use the terms “popping noise” and “container
rupture” over “explosion.”) Ed Gonzalez, the Harris County sheriff, who
stood next to Royall, said that exposure to the smoke was like “standing
over a barbecue pit.” Richard Rennard, an Arkema executive who spoke
after Royall and Gonzalez, continued in that vein. “It’s not a chemical
release that’s happening,” Rennard said. “It’s a fire,” one that could
produce “irritants.” Pressed about whether those irritants were “toxic,”
he hesitated, then said, “The smoke is noxious. Its toxicity—it’s a
relative thing.”

At a separate press conference, however, Brock Long,
the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that
the plume was “incredibly dangerous,” though a FEMA spokesperson later
told the Washington Post that this assessment was shifting as more
information came in.

What everyone agrees on is that no one should go near the plant just
yet. For now the authorities are just counting pops, or explosions, from
a distance. First responders who were closer to the plant than the perimeter of the evacuation zone have
been treated for headaches and dizziness. When a reporter asked Rennard
why the company, faced with the hurricane forecast, and with the waters
rising, hadn’t moved the chemicals somewhere else, he answered, “We certainly didn’t want to bring these containers out onto the road with
hundreds of thousands of people being evacuated and having a trailer
stuck on the highway somewhere.” That is a fair point, and an
instructive one. The city of Houston didn’t order an early evacuation because officials were afraid of what could happen on the highways. Our
coastal cities do not appear to be prepared for a new era of extreme weather; nor, for that matter, do our inland cities. And where are all
the people and container trucks and chemical canisters supposed to go,
anyway? It’s a big country, but you still need a plan. (Such planning
ought to be extended internationally, to the larger matter of all those carbons that we are burning as a matter of course.)

Did Arkema at least take all the precautions available to it? The answer
to that question will likely need to wait. Rennard said that the plant
had backups to its backups, but that Harvey was just too much. (Forty inches
of rain had fallen on Crosby in twenty-four hours.) He used the word
“compromised” more than once, and said, “I’m not sure what more we could
have done.” Still, there are many plants in the Houston area; it’s worth
asking why this one experienced blasts when others didn’t. There are, in
fact, warehouses and storage depots for every manner of chemical and
hydrocarbon in the Houston area. Major industrial facilities have shut
down, with apparent safety, if only in the short term, executing
emergency plans that agencies like the E.P.A. pushed them to draw up
over decades. (The capacity to refine three million barrels of oil a day
has been taken offline, according to the Wall Street Journal, a loss
that has already had an effect on energy markets.) There are, at the same time, warehouses and depots for every manner of chemical and hydrocarbon in the Houston area, storing toxic or noxious materials that may never be fully accounted for, between the flood and Texas’s relatively loose regulatory regime. And there have been a number of other fires, which have devastated both businesses and homes, as well as spills and broken sewers. (Also, floating mini-islands of fire ants.) Assessments of damage and negligence are just beginning. Harvey
has demonstrated that a storm doesn’t always do its worst damage
when the winds are blowing the hardest. The “pops” from Arkema are
particularly showy, but there have almost certainly been quieter
ruptures, too, that the water is still hiding.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.

The volunteers who flocked to Houston to rescue storm victims are part of a greater narrative of heroism, and of declining faith in government.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.